Veterans Under the Shadow of the Gulf War Illness Reese Moriyama

1 A Welcome Extinguished: Veterans Under the Shadow of the Gulf War Illness Reese Moriyama HIST 491 Professor Szefel May 9, 2010 2 I got to where I couldn’t even hardly breathe. It’s just so much, you know, my migraines, my rash, my poor circulation. My legs swell up for no reason. I had two surgeons from Walter Reed come down and tell me, “we don’t know what’s going on.” I have tried to be faithful to my country, like President Kennedy who said, “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Sad to say, I went and did for my country, but my country’s not doing for me. 1 These are the words of Sgt. Twymon, a veteran of the 1991 Gulf War. Like thousands of other veterans, Twymon saw his life turned upside down. When the troops returned home they initially received welcome as heroes. However, several months later, by the Spring of 1992, Gulf War troops began suffering from a mysterious range of ailments, from severe headaches, to gastrointestinal complications, to memory loss. No one knew why. Gradually, the Gulf War veterans, men and women who had risked their lives to fight a dictator halfway around the world, watched as their very own health care system faltered in attempts to find a correct diagnosis for them. The discussion of Gulf War veterans and their plight with health care will be approached from a variety of perspectives. First, a background of war illnesses, from shell shock in World War I, to Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder in Vietnam, will be investigated in order to properly frame the larger discussion of the Gulf War in its historical context, in which veterans faced multiple problems upon returning home. Following this, the focus of this paper, the Gulf War Syndrome (GWS) will be analyzed in two parts. The first section will explore the 1 Johnson, Alison. Gulf War Syndrome: Legacy of a Perfect War. (MCS Information Exchange, 2001). 173. 3 roots of GWS and how it emerged from the Gulf War as a consequence of miscommunication, assumption, and fear. The second part will demonstrate the complications that the veterans faced at home when the medical and federal systems failed to properly diagnose them, in light of GWS. An analysis of newspaper articles, veteran testimonies, congressional hearings, and research studies, will demonstrate how much the soldiers had to fight for recognition and assistance. This thesis will ultimately shed light on the consequences of the medical community’s actions towards a misunderstood illness, by analyzing the opposing diagnosis of mental and physical illnesses on Gulf War veterans. Throughout the 20 th century, the veterans faced undiagnosed illnesses. In Rites of Spring , Modris Ekstein examines the cultural and intellectual impact of World War I, noting the effect of witnessing and internalizing the horrors of the battlefield on soldiers. Ekstein focuses on how this diminished humanity affected many troops on the front line: “After a soldier had been at the front for three weeks a distinct change was noticed in him: his reactions generally became dulled, his face showed less expression, his eyes lost their sparkles.” 2 Suffering from shell shock, soldiers became confused and disconnected from their surroundings. Shell shock was particularly damaging on soldiers because as Ekstein explains,“army staffs and medical officers were slow to admit such a condition…If the military was reluctant to recognize shell shock, the civilians had no inkling of the condition whatsoever.”3 Due to the fact that shell shock was an enigmatic, yet prevalent illness among troops, neither the military, nor the medical community knew how to properly handle the veterans who were suffering from it. This problem stemmed from the new conditions that the troops were forced to endure; plummeting morale from being stuck in the 2 Eksteins, Modris. Rites of Spring. (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989) 172. 3 Ibid, 172-173. 4 filthy trenches with dead comrades, continuous artillery fire from enemy positions, and a strong sense of hopelessness in the face of death all contributed to shell shock. 4 World War II presented a different set of problems to veterans upon returning home. In Soldiers from the War Returning: the Greatest Generation’s Troubled Homecoming from World War II , Thomas Childers narrates three stories of American soldiers fighting in the Second World War, ranging from a bomber gunner’s ordeal in German captivity, to an infantryman who lost both his legs in battle. Using these three stories as a lens, Childers argues that the “Greatest Generation” returned home victorious to a grateful nation, but as the years went by, “the painful realities of their post-war experiences [were] often…muffled under a blanket of nostalgic adulation.”5 Childers explains that many people were too caught up in praising the veterans of their generation: any negative experiences of the veterans in postwar America, such as alienation from family and psychological wounds, were often overlooked in favor of a optimistic and highly motivated façade. This blinded many from the truth that around 1.3 million American soldiers suffered from some sort of psychological illness during WWII such as depression, nightmares, and episodes of rage.6 Three decades later, the high esteem of the American soldier plummeted in the wake of an emerging ailment: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. In Vietnam, the U.S military was forced to fight a jungle war, in which the enemy was never clearly defined, as they were often concealed within towns or the forests. This frustration with the fog of war, coupled with a decline in morale from mounting casualties and unit mutiny, identified the ailment that today is known as Post- Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. PTSD is dangerous as a postwar disorder, because it 4 188-189. 5 Childers, Thomas. Soldiers from the War Returning: the Greatest Generation’s Troubled Homecoming from World War II. (New York, HMH Publishing Company, 2009) 4. 6 Ibid, 8. 5 damages the natural “fight or flight” response of the body to danger, causing the suffering individual to become frightened or paranoid even when there is no danger. 7 In Achilles in Vietnam , Jonathan Shay argues that the Vietnam War can be juxtaposed to Homer’s Iliad , to shed light on PTSD. Shay is able to make sense of a striking contradiction between winning small skirmishes, but losing the overall war. He states that in light of victory, the loss of the dead was never a burden because it was believed that the dead gave their lives for victory. 8 However, in the case of Vietnam, in which the U.S military won most of the skirmishes, but lost the overall war, the loss of the dead became a burden to the living. 9 The regret of surviving the war that haunted many Vietnam veterans only worsened when the veterans were forced to confront a medical community that was largely ineffective in diagnosing them. Vietnam veteran Wilbur Scott, author of Vietnam Veterans Since the War: Politics of PTSD, Agent Orange, and the National Memorial , explains one of these main flaws in the medical community: “mental health professionals across the country assessed disturbed Vietnam veterans using a diagnostic nomenclature which contained no specific entries for war-related trauma. As a result, physicians usually did not collect the military histories as part of the diagnostic workup”. 10 Many medical professionals assumed that the Vietnam veterans were suffering “from neurosis or psychosis whose origins and dynamics lay outside the realm of combat”. 11 Essentially, by overlooking the possibility that the veterans’ degrading health could be caused by direct war trauma, medical professionals created a flawed model of diagnosis. This model excluded the veterans’ military history, making it even harder to trace the beginnings of their mental illnesses, when it was later 7 Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The National Institute of Mental Health 8 Shay, Jonathan. Achilles In Vietnam. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994) 7 9 Ibid. 10 Scott, Wilbur. Vietnam Veterans Since the War: Politics of PTSD, Agent Orange, and the National Memorial . (Aldine de Gruyter, 1993) 5 11 Ibid. 6 discovered that veterans were vulnerable to trauma from combat. 12 Hence, on the whole, veterans returning home from Vietnam suffered from the medical community’s inability to properly diagnose them in light of a widespread disorder. Sometimes, the very rules of science can hinder the progress they were meant to promote in the first place. Linda Nash, a historian out of the University of Washington, demonstrates this in her book Inescapable Ecologies , in which she analyzes the consequences that can arise from scientists becoming trapped by their own methodology. Nash examines cancer clusters in California during the 1960s, which were being caused by pesticides used to protect crops. Migrant workers who spent long hours in the field began complaining of a series of symptoms that were initially believed to be caused by their lack of hygiene and modernity. 13 The main issue for doctors attempting to assist the ill workers was that “most doctors were unfamiliar with pesticide-related illnesses. They knew little to nothing about the chemicals that were used, the symptoms they caused, or the multiple ways they entered the body”. 14 Because a majority of the symptoms suffered by migrant workers were not physical (cramps, headache), doctors mistook these symptoms for bacterial infections or even hysteria. 15 Essentially, the evidence backing the causes to be environmental poisoning was shaky, at best. There was little consistency in the data collected from the migrant workers, and medical and scientific professionals alike decided against the idea that the environment was the principal cause of the rising ailments.

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